Chapter Content
Okay, so, um, here's the thing, right? We've kinda, like, been talking about this whole idea of, you know, growing old gracefully and all that jazz. And, uh, I remember this, like, quote from Noël Coward, where he said, "It's a question of being sincere, and if you're supple, you've nothing to fear." It's kinda stuck with me, you know?
And, honestly, a big thing that's been, like, underlying a lot of what we've covered, is just plain hard work. Like, yeah, some people, they might have, like, these moments of brilliance, these flashes of insight, whatever, but all talent, *all* of it, has gotta be, like, nurtured, worked on, you know, kept shining. Nobody, and I mean nobody, really gets to where they're going without putting in some serious effort. I mean, even the most naturally gifted people, they gotta, like, shape and mold their abilities. It's like taking raw gold and, like, turning it into jewelry, you know? That's what makes late blooming, it makes it kind of, like, a slow and sometimes difficult process, that starts with finding your thing, finding that talent.
I mean, think about, like, Michel de Montaigne. The French dude, right? He, like, totally bailed on public life at, like, forty, and spent the rest of his days just writing essays. Sitting in an attic, reading, and writing, you know? But that's what sparked a whole new literary genre and, like, contributed to a philosophical movement. You don’t have to be a Montaigne, though, to, you know, find your talent and work at it.
And I saw this, you know, like, so many times, during my years as a talent consultant. I talked to, literally, hundreds of people, from all walks of life, you know, from cleaners to executives. And it was, like, amazing how many of them actually loved what they did. But then, you'd also meet people who just felt trapped, you know, like they were going nowhere.
It was the people who felt ignored, those were the ones who really stuck with me. People who, like, joined a company wanting to make a difference, to build something, but ended up feeling like their work just didn't matter. They weren't just grumpy, sometimes they were actually sad. You know, the feeling of lost time, eroded skills, and this nagging feeling, that there's something inside that just wants to be used, to be, you know, not forgotten. It's not just, like, a tragedy of unemployment, it's a real thing that happens to people whose work feels insignificant. And, you know, they need some kind of direction. Some of them, they need to find their talent.
So, what is talent, really, you know? I remember Noël Coward, he was on Dick Cavett's talk show, and Cavett asked him, like, "What's the word for when someone has terrific prolific qualities?" And Coward just snapped back, deadpan, "Talent." And we think we know it when we see it, right? Like, it's this innate ability that leads to, like, incredible achievement. Businesses, they're always talking about "talent attraction." In that sense, "talent" it's, like, a high or exceptional professional ability.
But there's a broader definition, right? Samuel Johnson, he defined it as "faculty; power; gift of nature." And he said it was "a metaphor borrowed from the talents mentioned in the holy writ." And, that's the Parable of the Talents, right? The master gives these talents, which are coins, to three servants. Two of them invest the money and make more. The third, he just buries it and gives back the same amount he was given. The master's ticked off, throws him "into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." So, it's not just about making money, it's about *doing* something with the gift you've been given.
And we can think about this, this cultivation of talents, as the pursuit of excellence. The Greek word for that is areté. Areté, it means reaching your full potential, making the most of your talents. It means, like, virtue. Like, it's virtuous to use your talents. To be excellent at something is a form of virtue.
Like Richard Hooker wrote, "The man or woman of areté is a person of the highest effectiveness; they use all their faculties: strength, bravery, wit, and deceptiveness, to achieve real results." Even something like deceptiveness! Aristotle gave, like, the example of a horse, whose excellence is to run and carry a rider, or an eye, whose excellence is to see. And a person's virtue is to "perform his characteristic activity well."
So, areté doesn't mean a specific capability, really. It's about being excellent at whatever it is you do best, using your talents. You can have a talent for anything! There are, like, canonical virtues, like, outlined in, like, philosophies and religions, but different areas of work prioritize different virtues. I mean, I even saw a science blog that recommended "carefreeness" and "arrogance" as scientific virtues. All the late bloomers that we have studied, they have all cultivated their own virtues. And that is what all the neuroscience and psychology can't tell us, that we have to cultivate our own talent.
We all have some set of talents, right? Something we can do well. You don't have to be Noël Coward, to have skills and abilities you can refine and use to, you know, "achieve real results." There's great virtue in working at what you're good at, in following your talents and abilities. We can all do more to reach our full potential. The parable of the talents, it's about all of us, it asks, are you cultivating your virtues? What we saw in the stories of Margaret Thatcher and Audrey Sutherland, of Frank Lloyd Wright and Ray Kroc, was areté in action.
Now, this cultivation, it can be hard, right? Achieving areté, achieving excellence, is hard work. Talents, they don't just exist, fully formed, waiting for the right opportunity. That's, like, the mistake Mr. Micawber makes, in David Copperfield. He's always talking about how his talent isn't appreciated, how he's going to prosper, once he finds the right outlet. But he never talks about actually working on those talents, whatever they might be. David Copperfield, he became a successful writer by working his tail off, right? Working long hours, day after day. You gotta find the right combination of natural ability and luck, but then you gotta work.
Malcolm X, he's a great example of this. When he was fifteen, a teacher told him he would never be able to become a lawyer, because he was Black. That was a realization for him, right? That he would never be accepted as an equal. So, he stopped trying as hard. Like, his grades plummeted, his behavior got worse. Looking back, he saw this moment, like, through religious eyes, as a moment of transformation.
For the next five years, Malcolm Little became a hustler, right? Dancing, wearing zoot suits, seducing women, selling drugs. He fell in with a bad crowd, started committing robberies. I mean, the research suggests he might have, like, exaggerated some of this, but he was definitely burglarizing places, drinking, doing drugs. He was unemployed, just drifting. In nineteen-forty-five, he got arrested in Detroit, and he fled to Boston, where he joined up with this guy named Shorty Jarvis, and they started a gang to burgle houses. They got caught, and because he was with a white woman, the trial was, like, totally racially motivated. He got a much tougher sentence than usual. He was sentenced to six to eight years in jail.
The first year in prison, it was crushing. He was getting high on nutmeg, cursing guards, throwing things. It got him solitary confinement. He hadn't studied anything since eighth grade, unless it was for, like, hustling purposes. But then, he met this fellow prisoner named Bimbi, who was known for his fascinating talks about all kinds of stuff. Listening to him, Malcolm learned about Thoreau, atheism, history. And he saw someone who could command respect with just his words. Bimbi told him he had brains, and he should use them.
So, he started correspondence courses, learning to write, mastering grammar. He moved on to Latin. He got moved to Concord prison, and he was influenced by his brother's conversion to Islam. His brother told him to stop eating pork and stop smoking, and he'd show him how to get out of prison. His sister got him transferred to another prison, where he had a library. His brother visited him, talked about Allah, told him white people were devils. He talked about Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam.
Malcolm started writing to Muhammad. He said he must have written his first letter, like, twenty-five times, trying to make it legible and understandable. This was a deliberate strategy of the Nation of Islam to target, you know, depressed and isolated prisoners. But it inspired him to continue his self-education. He was frustrated that he couldn't express himself in his letters, so he went to the prison library. He browsed the dictionary, amazed by all the words. He started copying them out. He copied the first page, read it out loud. He was so fascinated, he just kept going. He claimed to have copied the entire dictionary.
His expanding vocabulary meant he could read more widely. He was, like, totally hooked, like so many people are when they discover reading. He crept out of bed at night and read by a crack of light, sneaking back when the guard passed. That's how he spent years educating himself.
He consciously remade himself into, like, this "organic intellectual," creating habits that would become legendary. His dedication and self-discipline were extraordinary, the opposite of his drifting youth. The trickster disappeared, replaced by someone who challenged authority.
He gave himself an extraordinary education, Herodotus, Kant, Nietzsche, H. G. Wells's History of the World, W. E. B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk, Gregor Mendel's Findings in Genetics, and so on. He was profoundly affected by history. He said, "I never will forget how shocked I was when I began reading about slavery's total horror." He went into prison barely able to write a letter, and he came out on the path to becoming an orator, a leader, and a preacher. When he left prison, he bought a watch, because time was precious to him, and he was going to continue to work exhaustively.
Through this mental labor, Malcolm X developed his areté, his excellence. It was political and religious, which made him divisive. But, the young man who went to jail, he was very different from the one who came out. He became the most influential preacher in the Nation of Islam, and, in his late thirties, he was a national figure. A lot of changes happened in his life after that. Malcolm X was assassinated, aged thirty-nine. But his legacy, it remains enormous. Without the hard work he did in prison, this legacy would have been unthinkable.
So, the lesson of areté, it's not just that we have to cultivate our own virtues. We also saw, in those stories, that it's difficult to discover areté in others without getting to know them well. It's going to take a new and different sort of assessment to get beyond appearances and discover the late bloomer within. How do we find late bloomers?
First, we gotta ditch the preconceptions. Cognitive decline, it's not as certain as we think. Learning new habits, it's not as hard as unlearning old ones. People who just keep going, who aren't going to make less effort just because they have security, they're more significant. Plenty of people retire and take up travel or golf. What's unusual are the people still working on something. Penelope Fitzgerald started writing novels at sixty, because she never gave up her intellectual interests. The ones who keep going are the ones to watch.
Second, look for motivation, which is often non-obvious. Samuel Johnson, right? He was lazy, inconsistent, but he was obsessive. His friend, Robert Dodsley, he knew Johnson would be a good dictionary writer because of that. You need to uncover what people do in secret, or what they just do, irrespective of circumstances. June Huh, the mathematician, he wanted to be a poet. Then he became so obsessed with math, he lived on frozen pizza so he wouldn't waste time cooking. Katalin Karikó, she put up with grant application rejections for years, before she achieved success with the COVID vaccine. Edward Jenner, he was a very observant person. Look at what people persist at, not what persistently happens to them.
Third, look for people who could be great again. A lot of people thought Steve Jobs was done for after he got fired from Apple. But he retained an aura of intrigue, which he later lived up to. Same with Frank Lloyd Wright. People who have been great can be great again, no matter how "over" they seem to be. Then there are people who achieved fantastic, but not famous, things when they were young, like Vera Wang. Michelangelo did almost no painting for fifteen years, and then he produced The Last Judgment.
Fourth, look for lack of context, changing context, or for people who are open to influences. Ava DuVernay, the movie director, she didn't pick up a camera until she was thirty-two. How much can be achieved simply by enabling people to sample the world more broadly, mid-career? The memoirs of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Malcolm X all contain a moment when they realized what it meant to live under slavery or racism. Once they saw it all again in different terms, their lives began to be transformed.
Fifth, find people who really believe age is just a number, who aren't going to be what other people expect them to be. We're used to people in their sixties and seventies taking up hobbies, staying fit, having exciting lives, but the idea that someone of that age can be as creative as a younger person, that has less cache. Yitang Zhang, the mathematician, when asked about his age, he said, "I don't care so much about the age problem. I don't think there is a big difference. I can still do whatever I like to do." How many people would quit their job at sixty, to kayak eight hundred kilometers of the Alaskan coastline, like Audrey Sutherland? One big reason she made that decision, she was guided by herself, not by what other people expected of her.
Now, people might say, "This is too selective. Anyone can take a group of late bloomers and draw conclusions. What about all the late bloomers who failed?" The existing data, it shows that not that many people flourish later in life. So, is this, like, overly optimistic?
But what if that data, it's not an undeniable fact? What if it's just the culture we live in? I talked to an economist, and he said the distribution of people who bloom late shows that most people do their best work in the first half of their life. The median age is low. But that only shows what has happened. Can we know what might happen if our culture changed?
This book can't prove that more people could do their best work after fifty. But it can show that it's much more possible than we believe. What if we could change our attitude, and change our lives? When economist Stephen Dubner had people make major life decisions based on a coin toss, the ones who changed tended to be happier. Change might be daunting, but it's good. If we expect more of ourselves, who knows what we might be able to achieve? As Emerson said, "With the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear."
Appearances can be deceptive. We just don't know how many people could be late bloomers, given the opportunity. To discover them, we need to get to know people. The usual measures of success, they don't work as well. Measuring late bloomers by results, it's not helpful. We learned everything from the late period, before the success. As Walter Pater said, our priority is "not the fruit of experience, but experience itself." Once we know what it was like to become a late bloomer, we can live differently.
Pater, he wrote that in an essay at the end of his book, *The Renaissance*. He warned against forming habits, which can lead to boring lives. He hated the constraints of bourgeois life, and wanted to awaken his readers to the wonders of lived experience. He believed that by being open to wonder, we could become vitally alive. "To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." He believed passion would give a deeper sense of life. That was challenging, back then, in Victorian Oxford, a place of moral restraint. It seems more normal to us, now. But how many of us actually live like that? How many of us could?
However old you are, whatever your status, life is waiting for you. It's not too late to pursue change, to seek a different life, a better world. Remember, late bloomers are often spurred to start by some interruption. This book shows that you can be your own interruption. Ask yourself, like Audrey Sutherland did, "What part of my goal can I achieve now? What can I do now to achieve my goal later?" Making these changes, however they occur, it's vitally important. As Elizabeth Bowen wrote, "Impossible is it for persons to be changed when the days they have still to live stay so much the same."
So, go! Change your days. Burn with a hard, gemlike flame.